In spite of its oddity, an object such as the lion does not demand to take center stage. It comes to serve as an auxiliary axis around which I perceive my environment. It draws my attention on where I am. Istanbul, in the afternoon. Kids in their swimming suits on the sea promenade. Their shouts while jumping into the water. The noise of cars driving by. I think of the lion as a compass. An object inscribing a circle wherever I place it, measuring the space surrounding it and serving my navigation purposes while on the road. Incorporating the lion into a photographic frame is equivalent to converting it into a gravitation point for the landscape itself. It sets an accent for me: on what I see, on what the people around me do. And this accent is on the here and now. Friday around 4pm on the shore of the Bosporus.

At the entrance of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum , Istanbul. Traveling with the lion may cause inconveniences sometimes, but there are certainly solutions to be found.

Depending on where you will be traveling, people will perceive the lion in different ways. Of course, they understand its symbolic background everywhere. Majestic animal. An icon of power and strength. Also, there will be surprise and most of the times you will get a smile. Or even loud laughter. That is why taking the lion out will always be a fulfilling experience. You give people a smile. You give them something to talk about when they get home in the evenings.
However, all aspects of interacting with the lion being similar regardless of where we are, there remain some interpretative differences in how people perceive it. Some cities in the world have a lion as their symbol. Other cities have football teams represented by the image of a lion.
Walking in Istanbul with a lion on your back immediately generates associations with the city’s famous football team Galatasaray. The Turkish word for lion is “Aslan”. And the most frequent answer we had to give was that “No, our Aslan does not have anything to do with Galatasaray. Not that we know, at least.”
And there we were. Walking the presumed Galatasaray-lion on the home ground of Beşiktaş, Galatasaray’s rival team. Complicated indeed. Çarşı (means Bazaar in Turkish) is the biggest fan group of Beşiktaş. That should serve as an explanatory framework to the picture below. Stay tuned for more football stories.